


In the Wartime

by V_Haley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:54:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_Haley/pseuds/V_Haley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finding comfort in wartime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Wartime

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for: incest, character death  
> Written 3/15/2006

There was no excuse--no rationalization, no way to make it acceptable or okay.  It was desire: the sexual euphoria of living when he should have died, an adrenaline drive to remember being alive, and the urge to take comfort in familiar hands that cared.  It was wartime; none of it mattered except living through the next day.  She didn't recognize him, but she wouldn't.  He, Harry, and Hermione didn't look the same for longer than a week, and they never looked like themselves.  Dumbledore had a Harry look-alike he paraded in front of the public to reassure them that their Boy Who Lived was safe and in hiding with his two best friends while the three of them were anonymously on the front lines anywhere Harry had the faintest chance to take Voldemort down and out.  In truth, Harry was the one they needed, but he and Hermione were the ones who kept Harry alive.

It hadn't happened yet, and the three of them had ended up being tended by mediwitches more often than anyone who knew the truth was comfortable with, but they hadn't died, either.  A Death Eater dagger in the stomach was not going to take him down this time.  Ginny's hands confidently stitched closed the wound, cast the spells to hold it and heal it.  It would make a nasty scar, but that was battlefield medicine.  His body's urges, perceptions of the world he would never have believed of himself six years ago, pulled her down and kissed her, but she backed away.  Not now, not here.  He was hurt, and she had other patients; others might still die.  She didn't understand why Dumbledore had ordered him treated before even the worst injured of their fighters, and her curiosity brought her back.  When they released him, he spent the night at the Burrow a floor beneath his parents, kissing their daughter as if she was someone else--as if he was someone else, and she wasn't his sister.  He didn't give her a name, and he was gone by morning.  If it didn't matter to him, it would matter to her.

He told himself she would pass it off as a wartime one night stand, and tried to forget the feel of his tongue between her thighs and her skilled, slender hands working at him.  He tried to forget that she'd called him Tom as she'd come and that Harry had teased him about his current body looking like the young Dark Lord.  The next time she had seen him, he had a new face, and she hadn't recognized him.  If Dumbledore didn't already have her on watch, Ron would have turned her in as a potential risk, but the first time she had seen combat, she had ended up in St. Mungos for a year screaming about Tom.  She was a mediwitch because it kept her off the front lines and made her useful, but no one trusted her with anything but the most basic information.  They couldn't be sure, even after all these years, how much of Tom was in her head.

Like Ginny, the twins were off the front lines.  They didn't have the temperament for it.  They ran their joke shop and let it double as a safe house for the Order, which was how Ron ended up seeing them again six years into the war.  Fred still had Angelina, but Martin had fled for Argentina.  Not before trying to convince George to go with him, but George was a Gryffindor and a Weasley.  He wouldn't run and desert his family and the war.  If Fred would stay, he would stay.  Martin didn't write, and George was lonely.  It was only one more night stand.  George writhed under him as Ginny had, his tongue and hands touching, pressing, seeking out the sensitive nipples and kissing down, down to warm, rigid skin that was surprisingly soft under his lips . . .  George came calling for Martin, and caught his hand in the morning, asking, "Stay."

He couldn't stay, but he came back.  He used the same face every time until George had mapped it, mapped his body and the white scars that covered it, the thick white dagger mark that was his reminder of Ginny.  A part of his mind wondered at this--that they could feel so close, that George could fancy himself in love with him, that he could want this to last forever.  The other part knew the truth: this wasn't permanent, couldn't be permanent.  They were brothers, and sooner or later George would figure that out.  There was no future for them, no happily ever after.  There was only the pleasure of the moment, guilty for the circumstances because George hadn't said yes, hadn't consented to his brother up his arse, buried in him, consuming him.  Because it would destroy George once he knew.  It was a wartime indulgence--wartime was the rhyme and reason, the factor that allowed Ron to keep coming back despite his conscience, despite his fear.  It was wartime that rationalized finding peace and a moment of safety with George's arms around him.

When the war ended, he kept coming.  There was no rationalization; no excuse.  Just the feel of George's lips on him, sucking expertly at him, tongue circling him--the taste of himself in George's mouth and George's easy laugh as he cracked a joke to interrupt something intimate, making it fun.  He came home to the Burrow a stranger: with George to meet his parents and as himself, a brother they believed they hadn't seen in six years.  A brother who they believed had been safe.  Dumbledore had offered him the publicity to get him the Order of Merlin--to get all of them the Order of Merlin.  He had turned it down; they all had.  At eleven, at fourteen, at seventeen, his driving ambition had been to stand apart from his brothers.  He had stood apart for six years of blood, brutality, terror and death.  He didn't want a medal for that--he didn't want publicity for being faster to kill than be killed, for crippling his opponent before the same could be done to him.  He wanted peace, like Hermione.  He wanted to vanish, like Harry.  But there was George, so he went home and met his lover as a stranger and brother.  He went home and met his parents as a stranger and lover.

The first time the twins tried to prank him as their brother, he nearly blew them to hell.  He did put a hole the size of a small Grim in one of the walls of their house, and it was fairly obvious then that whatever else he had done, he hadn't been out of the war.  He was too hair-triggered; too paranoid.  He had fought in the same skirmishes that killed Charlie and crippled Bill, and he had walked away from both.  He had been the one to find Percy when the Death Eaters were done with him and deliver his brother--broken body and mind--to St. Mungos.  He had been the one to catch Ginny, at the end of the war, passing information on Order safe houses to Voldemort's people.  He had been the one to testify against her and put his sister in Azkaban, which by that time had been recovered, even if the Dementors hadn't been.

Everything he had seen in the six years since he graduated burned in his eyes, through the tension in his whipcord body, nothing but slender muscle and steady hands, through reflexes that were too good for him to have been in hiding.  They didn't talk about it, but his family knew.  George asked his lover what it had been like, trying to understand his brother.  Then he walked in on his brother changing instead of his lover changing and asked him, in a terrible, solemn voice, where he got his scars: the two across his pecs where Lucius had started with a knife before Harry had gotten to them, the burns along one side that Hermione had patched up while they were on the run, the one on his stomach right above his hip that had led to him kissing Ginny, all the marks George knew blind and braindead from his lover's body.

"You already know where they're from," Ron told him calmly and pulled a shirt over his head.  He was surprised to find there was no more guilt, only a consuming sadness under the calm.  He had known it would come to this.  He passed George without saying good-bye.  George didn't move to stop him, only watched, as if he was expecting something.  It didn't occur to George that he would leave, that he could walk out without coming back.  That he would run, as Harry had, dropping out of the wizarding world so perfectly that only the two people who helped set up his bolt hole knew how to find him.  George expected a confrontation, answers.  _Why?  Why did you fuck me?  Why did you touch me?  Why did you stay?  Why did you come back?  Goddam it!  What did this mean?  What had it meant?  Where, damn you, where did the lies stop and the truth start?  Where did we go from here?  What happened next?  What do we tell people?  What can we tell people?_   He could see the questions in George's eyes, could see the betrayal and confusion.

Ron nodded civilly to his mother as he walked through the kitchen into the yard.  When he hit the edge of the wards, he raised his wand and apparated.  The word was quietly spoken; there was no one to hear.

"Good-bye."


End file.
